Common Core--9th Grade

9-1 Literary Texts—Literary Elements and the Short Story

Short Stories
§ “The Gift of the Magi” (O. Henry) (E)
§ “The Overcoat” (Nikolai Gogol) (EA)
§ “The Most Dangerous Game” (Richard Connell)
§ “The Kitchen Boy” (Alaa Al Aswany)
§ “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (James Thurber) (EA)
§ “The Cask of Amontillado” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Black Cat” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Scarlet Ibis” (James Hurst)
§ “Everyday Use” (Alice Walker) (EA)
§ “The Minister's Black Veil” (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (EA)
§ “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (Leo Tolstoy)
§ Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories (ZZ Packer)

Informational Texts
None for this unit

Art, Music, and Media
Prompt: How do artists create visual narratives in photography and painting?

Art
§ Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel (1482)
§ Sultan Muhammad, From a Khamsa of Nizami (1539-43)
§ Jacob Lawrence, On The Way (1990)
§ Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing The Delaware (1851)
§ Pablo Picasso, Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905)
§ Tina Barney, Marina’s Room (1987)
§ Roy DeCarava, Untitled (1950)

Media
§ Brooklyn Bridge (documentary film, Ken Burns, director)
§ BMW short films (e.g., “Chosen,” Ang Lee, director)

9-2 Literary Texts—The Novel--Honor

Novels
Recommended
§ To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) (L933)
Alternate Selections
§ The Killer Angels (Michael Shaara) (E) (L610)
§ All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque) (L830)
§ The Color Purple (Alice Walker) (IB) (L630)
§ Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) (EA) (L630)
§ Black Boy (Richard Wright) (L855)

Informational Texts

Additional Resources
§ Famous American Trials: “The Scottsboro Boys” Trials (1931-37) (University of Missouri-Kansas School of Law) (Note: This website contains primary and secondary source accounts of “The Scottsboro Boys” trial.)

Art, Music, and Media

Art (Photographs)
§ Dorothea Lange, selected photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression
§ “America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945” (Library of Congress)

Media
§ To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) (Robert Mulligan, director)

9-3 Literary Texts—Poetry--Beauty

Poems

• “Ozymandias” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) (E)
• “The Raven” (Edgar Allan Poe) (E)
• “Sonnet 73” (William Shakespeare) (E)
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (John Keats) (E)
• “We grow accustomed to the Dark” (Emily Dickinson) (E)
• “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) (E)
• “Homecoming” (Julia Alvarez) (EA)
• “Love Is” (Nikki Giovanni) (EA)
• “A Lemon” (Pablo Neruda) (EA)
• “Saturday’s Child” (Countée Cullen) (EA)
• “Dream Variations” (Langston Hughes) (EA)
• “In Time of Silver Rain” (Langston Hughes) (EA)
• “I Ask My Mother to Sing” (Li-Young Lee)
• “The Gift” (Li-Young Lee)
• “Phantom Limbs” (Anne Michaels)
• Psalm 96 (King James Bible)
• “Lord Randall” (Anonymous)
• “Campo di Fiori” (Czeslaw Milosz)
• “The Darkling Thrush” (Thomas Hardy)
• “Poetry” (Marianne Moore)
• “Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard” (Thomas Gray)
• “The Sound of the Sea” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
• “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (William Wordsworth)
• “The Lady of Shalott” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
• “The Underground” (Seamus Heaney)
• “In Trackless Woods” (Richard Wilbur)
• “The Reader” (Richard Wilbur)
• “Walking Distance” (Debra Allbery)
• “Morning Glory” (Naomi Shihab Nye)
• Haiku selections

Informational Texts

Informational Text

• Excerpts from Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958 (William Faulkner, Frederick L. Gwynn, ed.)
• Excerpts from “Crediting Poetry,” the Nobel Prize Lecture, 1995 (Seamus Heaney)

Art, Music, and Media

Prompt: "What similarities can we find between great poems and masterpieces of other kinds?"

Music

• Giacomo Puccini, “Un bel di, vedremo” (Madama Butterfly, 1904)
• Giacomo Puccini, “O mio babbino caro” (Gianni Schicchi, 1918)

Art and Architecture

• Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503-06)
• Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1486)
• Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night (1889)
• Michelangelo, David (1504)
• The Parthenon (447-432 BC)
• Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick C. Robie House (1909)
• Chartres Cathedral (begun around 1200)

9-4 Literary Texts—Drama--Fate

Plays

• Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare) (E) (L1260)
• Antigone (Sophocles) (E)(L1090)
• Oedipus the King (Sophocles)(1010)

Informational Text

• Excerpt on comedy and tragedy from Poetics (Aristotle)

Art, Music, and Media

Prompt: What similarities exist between how playwrights and painters depict tragedy?
Art

• Pablo Picasso, (1903)
• Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin (1604-1606)
• Artemesia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1625)
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9-5 Literary Texts—Epic Poetry--Heroism

Stories

• Mythology (Edith Hamilton)

Poems

• The Odyssey (Homer) (E)
• The Aeneid(Virgil)
• “The Lotos-Eaters” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
• Excerpts from “Endymion” (John Keats) (EA)
• “The Song of Hiawatha” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) (EA)
• Excerpts from the Ramayana (attributed to the Hindu sage Valmiki)

Informational Text

• Excerpts from The Gold of Troy (Robert Payne)
• Excerpts from Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Jonathan Shay)
• Excerpts from Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (William Manchester)
• Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (Elizabeth D. Samet)
• Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Andrew Carroll, ed.)
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

Art, Music, and Media
Music

• Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1689)

9-6 Literary Texts—Literary Nonfiction—Reflection (The Memoir, The Essay, and The Speech)

Memoirs

• One Writer's Beginnings (Eudora Welty)
• A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Harry E. Crews)
• Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)
• “A Four Hundred Year Old Woman” (Bharati Mukherjee)
• In Search of Our Mothers’ GardensAlice Walker) (EA)(L1160)
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston)
• “Learning to Read and Write” (Frederick Douglass) (EA)
• Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin)
• “A Sketch of the Past” (Virginia Woolf)

Essay

• Excerpts from Life on the Mississippi (Mark Twain) (EA)

Informational Texts

Speeches

• “Second Inaugural Address” (E) and/or “The Gettysburg Address” (Abraham Lincoln) (E)
• “Address at the March on Washington” and/or “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) (E)
• Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech 1949 (William Faulkner) (EA)
• “Sinews of Peace Address” (Winston Churchill) and/or “Brandenburg Gate Address” (Ronald Reagan)

Essays

• “Politics and the English Language” (George Orwell) (E)
• “The Lost Childhood” (Graham Greene)
• Excerpts from The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (Martin Seymour-Smith)
• “Lear, Tolstoy, and The Fool” (George Orwell)
• “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Clement Greenberg)
• “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (William Wordsworth)

Art, Music, and Media

Prompt: How is a self-portrait like a memoir?
Art

• Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1889)
• Jan van Eyck, Self-Portrait (1433)
• Albrecht Durer, Self-Portrait at the age of 13 (1484)
• Leonardo da Vinci, (c.1513)
• Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at an early age (1628)
• Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669)
• Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630s)
• Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait (1977)
• Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man (self-portrait) (1843)
• Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Self-Portrait with Dark Coat (No Date)
• Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1973)
• Balthus, Le roi des chats (The king of cats) (1935)
• Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait (1907)